The Decades That Invented the Future, Part 10: 1991-2000

Share

The Decades That Invented the Future, Part 10: 1991-2000

Today's leading-edge technology is headed straight for tomorrow's junk pile, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. Everyone loves the latest and greatest.
Sometimes, though, something truly revolutionary cuts through the clutter and fundamentally changes the game. And with that in mind, Wired is looking back over 12 decades to highlight the 12 most innovative people, places and things of their day. From the first transatlantic radio transmissions to cellphones, from vacuum tubes to microprocessors, we'll run down the most important advancements in technology, science, sports and more.
This week's installment takes us back to 1991-2000, when venture capitalists matured, military drones were put in use and the first MP3 player came to market.
We don't expect you to agree with all of our picks, or even some of them. That's fine. Tell us what you think we've missed and we'll publish your list later.

1994: The Sony Playstation (Games)

By the mid-'90s it was clear that videogames were here to stay, but they were still thought of primarily as a children’s toy. Many electronics makers thought the way to expand the market was with "set-top boxes" that would play games, movies, music etc. and browse the nascent web.
But Sony cut through all the confusion and defined a whole new market for pure gaming with PlayStation. The CD-ROM format didn’t just allow gamemakers to craft more realistic worlds, it let Sony sell PlayStation as an upscale piece of technology perfect for the college dorm room. By making games for adults, PlayStation helped the game industry balloon even larger. It was the first gaming platform to sell over 100 million units.
Image: Wikimedia

1995: GPS-Guided Munitions (War)

During the 1990-1991 Gulf War, Iraqi ex-dictator Saddam Hussein ordered his armies to invade Kuwait. In response, the United States mounted an all-out bombardment of Iraqi troops and infrastructure, followed by a counter-invasion that expelled Saddam's forces from the country. During the war, Iraq was also hit with thousands of precision-guided bombs -- a weapon that had never before seen large-scale use in combat.
For the Pentagon, there was a certain logic to it. The White House needed to maintain public support for a war that was to be broadcast live around the world, thus civilian deaths had to be kept to a minimum. And to a degree, precision-guided bombs proved to be more accurate than the unguided -- or "dumb" -- bombs that came before. In total, about 8,000 laser-guided missiles were used against Iraqi targets during the war. The trouble is that lasers can be blocked if it ís a particularly cloudy or dusty day, increasing the chance that a laser-guided missile may stray off course and strike something that it was never supposed to hit.
Yet in 1995, four years after the war, the Global Positioning System (or GPS) became fully operational, which also helped make precision-guided bombs a lot more precise, and no longer dependent on the weather. Instead, a network of satellites beam radio waves down to the earth containing information about where the satellites are and the exact time at which their signals were broadcast. A GPS unit on the ground is then able to determine its own geo-location when it gets reception from four or more satellites and by calculating the differences in the signals. The accuracy is usually within a few yards, whether you're using GPS in your car (civilians finally gained access to GPS in 2000) or to guide a bomb dropped from an airplane.
Unfortunately, GPS signals are pretty easy to jam, which is why satellite-guided bombs are fitted with a backup option known as inertial navigation. This calibrates where a missile goes via readings from motion and velocity sensors. Still, even the most accurate bombs in the world are still dropped by people, and people make mistakes. And while precision-guided bombs are much more accurate than what came before, there is no such thing as a perfect weapon.
Photo: Laser-guided bombs on the flight deck of the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier during Operation Desert Storm. Credit: Navy/Wikimedia.

1991: Linus Does Linux (Computers)

In the summer of 1991, Linus Torvalds was a student at the University of Helsinki living with his mother, and he started building a new operating system for his 33-MHz Intel PC. He called the project "just a hobby." He said it "won’t be big and professional." But as it turns out, the notice he posted to an internet newsgroup announcing the project was -- without a doubt -- one of the most important moments in the history of computing.
The open source operating system he built was Linux. Torvalds set out to build a new version of the Unix operating system for Intel-based PCs, but he ended up building the platform that runs so much of the modern internet -- not to mention millions of modern smartphones. Linux never really challenged Windows on desktops and laptops -- as many expected it would -- but it reached even bigger heights.
Linux is the OS that underpins Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and so many other services across the net. And if you own an Android phone, you're using Linux there too. Linux has become such a force that even Microsoft can no longer ignore it. After years of treating Linux like the black plague, Microsoft is now working to ensure that its software plays nicely with Linux.
It was just a hobby. But it was also a revolution.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

1998: MP3 Player (Gadgets)

You only think the Apple iPod was the first MP3 player. Credit for inventing the device goes to a South Korean company you've never heard of.
Three years before Apple dominated the market with the iPod, SaeHan Information Systems introduced the MPMan in 1998. It had 64 MB of memory, enough for a whopping 18 songs. That's all of Nirvana's Nevermind and half of Pearl Jam's Ten.
From such humble beginnings grew a music revolution. These days even the smallest MP3 player can hold all the grunge worth hearing, even as the players themselves gave way to smartphones and and subscriptions services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Rdio give us all the music we want on the go, including all of Ten.
Image: Michele M. F./Flickr

1994: RQ-1 Predator Drone (Vehicles)

The General Atomics' RQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft made its first flight in 1994. But unlike most other new military aircraft that take years -- or even decades -- before entering service, the Predator was flying missions through former Yugoslavian airspace just one year later. The rush to service proved to be a turning point for remotely piloted aircraft, giving birth to a new form of unmanned combat.
With its small, four-cylinder engine and long, slender wings, the RQ-1 sips fuel and can be flown for longer periods of time than traditional manned aircraft. Flying high above the action on the ground, its camera provides an easily maneuverable eye-in-the-sky that's difficult to see or hear and keeps the boys behind the controls safely back at base.
After 9/11, a slightly modified RQ-1 Predator would be renamed the MQ-1. Its multi-use role would now include carrying weapons, not simply observation. Improved versions would increase the loiter time, transit speed and load hauling capabilities. Use of the MQ-1 would expand to many countries including Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq and Somalia. Civilian versions would be used here in the United States with cameras and sensors watching drug smugglers on the Mexico border, as well as helping scientists make atmospheric measurements and helping the U.S. Forest Service keep an eye on forest fires.
Image: US Navy

1995: Oklahoma City Bombing (Security)

One of the first large-scale acts of terrorism in the United States occurred on April 19, 1995, when Timothy McVeigh drove a rental truck filled with explosives to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
McVeigh, an anti-government activist who was later executed for the deed, killed 168 people and injured hundreds of others.
In a jailhouse interview, McVeigh likened the 19 children killed at a daycare center in the building as "collateral damage."
Photo: AP/David Longstreath

1990: Photoshop (Photography)

The '90s saw the first commercially produced digital SLR, Kodak’s DCS-100, which stood on the backs of engineering giants -- Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith had invented the first digital sensor in 1969, and in 1975, Steven Sasson a Kodak engineer, built the first digital still camera. But the decade’s biggest contribution to photography is actually a piece of software -- Photoshop.
In 1990, Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released and no model or sunset photo would ever be the same. Invented by brothers Thomas and John Knoll, Photoshop is still one of, if not the most important photo-editing tools on the market, and sits on virtually every pro photographer's computer. Instead of just the dodge and burn techniques of the traditional darkroom, Photoshop has given photographers an incredibly robust and diverse group of tools to use on their photos.
In fact, it’s hard to overestimate the software’s impact. It allowed users to create photo-realistic manipulations so convincing that it forced audiences to reconsider what "real" is. Newspapers in particular struggled with this concept -- remember the darkened photo of O.J. Simpson on the cover of Time Magazine? Or when Los Angeles Times photographer Brian Walski made a composite of two separate photos from Iraq and passed them off as one?
The layer metaphor on which much of Photoshop’s power is based, as well as its sophisticated manipulation tools, have reshaped not only photography, but illustration and videography. And in an industry where a product is lucky to achieve a shelf-life of a few years, Photoshop has gone unsurpassed for decades as it continues to surprise and allow users to innovate. It also joins Google and Xerox as a rare product whose name has also become a common English verb.

1990s: The Internet (Culture)

The publication of Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau's "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project" on Nov. 12, 1990, lays the groundwork for the most transformative medium of our times. Within a year, the web makes its public debut; the Mosaic web browser helps bring the web to the masses starting in 1993.
Rapid adoption of this user-friendly portion of the internet leads to commercialization, and web giants like Yahoo (founded in 1994) and Google (1998) transform the way we do everything, from getting our daily (OK, minute-by-minute) news fixes to communicating with friends and colleagues and indulging ourselves with entertainment. RealNetworks (founded as Progressive Networks in 1995) pioneers streaming media; by 1999, Napster is ready to begin blowing up the music industry.
Nothing will ever be the same.
A shameless, self-promotional footnote: Beginning in January 1993, a publication called Wired begins chronicling technology's massive cultural impact.
Photo: Tim Berners-Lee, left, and Robert Cailliau, right, pose next to the first Web server, which ran on this NeXT computer, on March 13, 2009. Credit: Martial TrezziniAP/KEYSTONE

1990s: Dark Energy (Science)

The universe constantly finds ways to surprise us. A story to illustrate this point: Astronomers in the 1990s were cataloging supernovas in the distant cosmos to understand our fate. They knew that the universe is expanding and models of the Big Bang suggested that the universe could evolve in three different ways. Either it would continue to expand forever, expand to a certain point and then coast along at the same size, or expand and then contract down into a reverse Big Bang, a sort of Big Crunch.
What these astronomers found was completely unexpected. According to the data, the universe has decided to take secret option number four – expand at a constant rate and then begin accelerating in its expansion. This pointed to a bizarre new force in the universe that scientists have taken to calling dark energy. Dark energy permeates all of space and behaves in a startling way, pushing on matter to counteract gravity. Physicists are completely at a loss to explain this mysterious driving force, which has been found to dominate the universe, accounting for 73 percent of all the mass-energy in the cosmos.
Three physicists were given the 2011 Nobel Physics prize for the discovery of dark energy, though its nature remains elusive as ever. While it upended scientists’ expectations, dark energy at least proved a vindication for Albert Einstein, who erroneously included a term in his mathematical models for the universe to keep it static. That extra term, known as lambda, turns out to act in the exact same way as dark energy. Apparently Einstein was so smart that even when he was wrong, he was right.
Top image: NASA/MPIA/Calar Alto Observatory, Oliver Krause et al. Secondary image: NASA.

1999: Women's Soccer (Sports)

The 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup was the last Cup of the century, and arguably the most important – not for who won, but for what they represented.
The epic finale between the United States and China capped weeks of sold out matches in a tournament that drew unprecedented crowds and media coverage. More than 90,000 people packed the Rose Bowl, the largest audience ever for a women’s sporting event. Forty million more watched it on television.
After fighting to a tie in extra time, the U.S. won with a penalty kick by Brandi Chastain, who became an icon when she fell to her knees, whipped off her jersey and waved it overhead as the crowed roared. It was a match for the ages that ushered in a new era for women’s soccer, if not women’s athletics in general.
The squad, led by Chastain, Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy, were hailed as heroes. They became role models to a generation of girls even as they pushed women’s soccer into the mainstream. Those young women had style and personality, and their charisma, skill and unwavering determination captivated the nation.
Their impact was felt beyond the United States. In the years since, women’s teams and leagues have appeared worldwide. Some have failed – the WUSA lasted just three years – and you could argue public interest in women’s collegiate and professional sports has waned. But women’s interest in sports has not. The 2012 Summer Games in London were known for the dominance of women, and soccer was no exception. The tournament was a nail-biter, and the gold medal game between the United States and Japan drew 4.35 million viewers, making it the most watched event in the history of NBC Sports Network.
But as is so often the case with the great moments in sports, the true legacy of the ’99 Women’s World Cup went beyond the game. The drive, determination and ethic displayed by the U.S. squad – and all the women who competed in that tournament – inspired a generation of women on and off the pitch.
Photo: United States soccer team captain Carla Overbeck, center, the U.S. team and FIFA President Sepp Blatter, left of Overbeck, celebrate with the trophy after defeating China in a 5-4 in a penalty shootout in the Women's World Cup Final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. Credit: Michael Caulfield/AP

1990s: Web Design (Design)

As increasingly powerful graphics capabilities and HyperText Markup Language became prevalent in the early '90s, people were suddenly able to express themselves creatively on their computers. The, in the mid-'90s, the internet explosion occurred and people were suddenly building their own web pages. And they had options. They could use turquoise text. They could animate GIFs. They could even make whole neon-colored banners flash. It was chaos. An entire generation was catapulted into graphic design with little background.
As bandwidth increased, first HTML and then Flash meant web designers — professional and otherwise — could do more with the space on the page. Minimalism was not yet trending, and there weren’t user-friendly programs for building web pages.
“Stuck in the '90s” is still a common insult for websites. But it wasn’t all headaches and squinting at colored font. The internet was figuring out how to communicate. And many of those practices we look at as obnoxious have popped back up, less intrusively, with more subtle design — the hit counter, for example, in the form of "likes" and followers.
Perhaps more importantly, people were exposed to design ideas and aesthetics in an interactive way. All these website builders started to integrate more attractive designs and the internet of today is as different as skinny jeans are from Hammer pants.

1990s: John Doerr (Business)

Before the 1990s, the title “venture capitalist” meant very little to anyone outside the business and technology world. Then, we met John Doerr, the first venture capitalist to break big.
Doerr started out working for Intel, first as an engineer and later as a salesperson. He left the chip giant to join venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers in 1980, and soon after started investing early in some of the technology giants we know today, like Google, Netscape, Amazon, and Sun Microsystems. Those investments put John Doerr on the map as one of the most well-known investors inside and outside of Silicon Valley.
For all his successful investments, Doerr also picked a few flops. Those include Homegrocer.com, a grocery delivered service that was eventually acquired by its competitor Webvan, the social network Friendster, and Excite@home, a merger of two Kleiner Perkins-funded companies Excite and @home, that called itself the “AOL” of broadband. Both companies crashed and burned when the dot-com bubble burst shortly after 2000.
Doerr endured his share of grief post-bubble, especially for his famous the internet is “underhyped” comment. But looking back now, Doerr was mostly right. In the last year, young startups like TaskRabbit, Postmates, and Instacart have begun delivering everything from groceries to video games from local stores to busy people who don’t have time to shop. Even established companies like eBay and Walmart are getting in on the local delivery game.
Today, you can still find Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, investing in a variety of startups, with an emphasis on those using technology to overhaul the education system.
Photo: John Doerr (left), from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Stewart Alsop, from InfoWorld/Alsop Louie Partners, share a laugh at the annual PC Forum, Tucson, Arizona, February, 1992. Credit: Ann E. Yow-Dyson/Getty Images.

Since 2007, Wired.com's This Day In Tech blog has reflected on important and entertaining events in the history of science and innovation, pursuing them chronologically for each day of the year. Hundreds of these essays have now been collected into a trivia book, Mad Science: Einstein's Fridge, Dewar's Flask, Mach's Speed and 362 Other Inventions and Discoveries that Made Our World*. It goes on sale Nov. 13, and is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online book stores.*